spacetime coordinates: 1995 Ohio / 2016 Budapest Norway Morocco Saint Petersburg
Black Widow is a 2021 American superhero film based on Marvel Comics featuring the character of the same name. Set promptly after the events of Captain America: Civil War (2016), the film sees Romanoff on the run and forced to confront a conspiracy tied to her past. (wiki)
Virtually Asian is a short video essay that looks at how white science-fiction filmmakers fill the backgrounds of their futuristic worlds with hollow Asian figures — in the form of video and holographic advertisements — while the main cast (if not the entirety of their fictional universe’s population) is devoid of actual Asian people.
With examples from major sci-fi productions spanning four decades, the video reveals this trope as a poor attempt to mask white supremacist imagination and casting. This well-trodden shortcut is meant to create the appearance of a diverse world without hiring non-white people in any significant capacity (in front of or behind the camera).
With a soundtrack by Vietnamese French beatmaker Onra, which deftly blends traditional and pop Chinese music from the 1960s with hip-hop, Virtually Asian is Thai American artist Astria Suparak’s first video. Itis part of Suparak’s ongoing research project, Asian futures, without Asians.
ARTIST BIO
ASTRIA SUPARAK is an artist and curator based in Oakland. Her cross-disciplinary practice often addresses urgent political issues and has taken the form of new tools and publicly accessible databases of subcultures and misunderstood histories. Her current research includes linguistics, diasporas, food histories, and sci-fi.
In 1905, a young Jewish immigrant from Luxembourg founded an electrical supply shop in New York. This inventor, writer, and publisher Hugo Gernsback would later become famous for launching the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. But while science fiction’s annual Hugo Awards were named in his honor, there has been surprisingly little understanding of how the genre began among a community of tinkerers all drawn to Gernsback’s vision of comprehending the future of media through making. In The Perversity of Things, Grant Wythoff makes available texts by Hugo Gernsback that were foundational both for science fiction and the emergence of media studies.
Wythoff argues that Gernsback developed a means of describing and assessing the cultural impact of emerging media long before media studies became an academic discipline. From editorials and blueprints to media histories, critical essays, and short fiction, Wythoff has collected a wide range of Gernsback’s writings that have been out of print since their magazine debut in the early 1900s. These articles cover such topics as television; the regulation of wireless/radio; war and technology; speculative futures; media-archaeological curiosities like the dynamophone and hypnobioscope; and more. All together, this collection shows how Gernsback’s publications evolved from an electrical parts catalog to a full-fledged literary genre.
The Perversity of Things aims to reverse the widespread misunderstanding of Gernsback within the history of science fiction criticism. Through painstaking research and extensive annotations and commentary, Wythoff reintroduces us to Gernsback and the origins of science fiction. (Goodreads)
Figure I.9. A Frank R. Paul caricature of The Electrical Experimenter newsroom from the April 1920 issue.
Figure I.7. Howard V. Brown’s cover for the March 1923 Science and Invention and Frank R. Paul’s illustration to “Science in New Apartment House De Luxe,” Science and Invention, January 1922.Figure I.13. Frank R. Paul’s original illustration of a logo for scientifiction, based on suggestions by readers A. A. Kaufman of Brooklyn, New York, Clarence Beck of West Bend, Wisconsin, and A. J. Jacobson of Duluth, Minnesota. Courtesy, Collection of Jim and Felicia Kreuzer, Grand Island, New York.
Figure I.10. Fifteen-year-old Kathleen Parkin, San Rafael, California, and the wireless set she constructed depicted in cover art by George Wall.
TimeSpace Warps 